What are you looking forward to most about Super Bowl XLVI? The game? The parties? The halftime show? As the most watched TV broadcast of the year, the Super Bowl brings much hype. Although the football game is the most obvious reason why people tune into the broadcast, many people tune in for other reasons, specifically the commercials.

Companies spend months strategizing, preparing, creating, and producing innovative and engaging commercials that will grab the viewer’s attention in hopes of promoting their product. In years past, the commercials were kept secret up until the moment they aired and were shown once during the live taping of the game, but last year some marketing officers went against the traditional approach and implemented a new plan of attack. As our society has become more and more engrossed into the world of social media, companies have discovered that combining their commercials with a social media overlay increases not only the awareness of their product, but also “gets the ball rolling” before the commercial airs live on TV.

The 2011 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) took place last night, August 28, 2011 at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. This year marked the award show’s 28th year. While the show did not have a host, it was nothing short of surprising and entertaining.

Many artists and celebrities strutted down the red carpet in fabulous garments while Selena Gomez hosted the VMA pre-show. The most memorable appearances were from Nicki Minaj, who wore metal, stuffed animals and pink hair, and Beyonce, who showed off her baby bump and announced that she and husand, Jay-Z are expecting a baby! Cobra Starship and Sabi performed as part of the pre-show.

Google+, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and LinkedIn are competing for the social network spotlight— making it hard for users to decide which sites are best for them. Pointing out the strengths and weakness of each platform, this infographic can help users decided which is the most appropriate site for them to use!

Thanks Mashable.com for highlighting this!

Infographic design by Emily Caufield.

Marketing over social networks used to be easy. You would create a MySpace page, upload a few songs and a picture or two and let millions of users do the rest by virtually spreading the word. Fast forward to now – boy, has that changed. With a seemingly ever-expanding plethora of social networking sites all trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, marketing yourself over these platforms has moved from hobby to chore to nearly a full time job. The typical artist must manage and keep up-to-date their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, website, and any other social media platforms they’ve chosen to market themselves over. Most artists will confess that constantly updating each and every one of their online marketing platforms takes much longer than they’d prefer. The process is arduous at best, and any artist will acknowledge their true desire to use that time creating music. Yet, in the modern age it’s an integral portion of anyone’s marketing strategy.

Enter Musedash, a new online application that lets musicians manage all their social network profiles from one main dashboard. From this dashboard, you can post content (be it status updates, links, news, or photos and videos) and choose to which networks you’d like the content to appear on. So you could simultaneously post a news article on your Facebook profile, your Facebook page, your Twitter, your MySpace, and any other applicable network – all with just one click. Musedash sets itself apart from competing services like Hootsuite and Ping.fm by catering specifically to musicians. And, recognizing that most musicians are not computer geeks in their spare time, creator Hilke Ros and the rest of the Musedash team have made user-friendliness a top priority. The result is a clean, simple and straightforward application designed to make social networking easier, not more complicated. Potentially, using Musedash to manage multiple social networks simultaneously could save valuable time and frustration, and would eliminate the possibility of mistakes or inconsistent information on different networks.

Photo by Tad Wagner

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery.

Networking for 10 days (or even 5) can easily overwhelm even the most advanced conference-goer.  What does X company do?  Who did I meet last night that I wanted to follow up with?  What was the restaurant I wanted to try in Memphis?  Which after party did I end up at the other night? 

Oniracom enjoyed an incredibly successful 10 day stint of networking, film viewing, music listening and trade show booth-ing.  Here are 3 tips for your next trip to SXSW or another conference or festival:

Check out this short video of the Oniracom booth at SXSW.  To keep up with all the action at SXSW be sure to follow us: http://twitter.com/oniracom

Oniracom is enjoying a full week of film, music & interactive at SXSW2011 by attending screenings, live shows and conference panels in Austin this week.  We have made a tremendous amount of quality contact with the true innovators of 2011 both for Oniracom and our newest venture ProducersPortal.com.

Please follow us on Twitter throughout the week:

Oniracom, Company
Jacob Tell, CEO
Justin Davis, Lead Strategist
Tyler Singletary, Dir of Biz Dev

We look forward to sharing more of our thoughts, experiences and media, so stay tuned…

A huge shout out to social media guru & analyst Brian Solis and data visualization specialist JESS3 as they have again teamed up for this powerful info-graphic “The Twitterverse.”  In an attempt to decode the universe of services and apps leveraging Twitter, this info-graphic sections the apps into 19 rings.  How quickly will this become outdated?  That is dependent upon the innovators.

Feel free to click around on each icon to learn more about these Twitter applications:

My favorite time of the year is here, it’s Festival Season!!  The Santa Barbara International Film Festival is taking place from January 27th to February 6th.

This years festival promises to be a little bit different with the addition of New Media.  They plan to update festival goers via Twitter and Facebook and even have a give-away or two.  Here is what they have to say:

SOCIAL MEDIA

This year SBIFF will undertake a massive social media campaign throughout the course of the festival. SBIFF will utilize both Facebook and Twitter in order to enhance the festival experience for festival attendees, filmmakers, and press.

• Both Facebook and Twitter will serve as valuable resources, providing up to the minute information on program changes and announcements. With these tools, festival attendees will be given many new ways to actively participate in events and activities. Throughout the 11 days, there will be many exciting opportunities to win film tickets, party passes, tribute tickets, and festival memorabilia. SBIFF also encourages everyone to share their favorite moments, films, and photos as the festival progresses, many of which may be reposted or tweeted.
• For filmmakers, these tools will be utilized to both promote their film at the festival, and also to network with other filmmakers and industry insiders in attendance.
• Members of the press should also take note as these tools will be used to make valuable announcements and highlight published coverage.

Now as much as this sounds like a great idea, it has been my experience from other festivals and conferences that the promise is never delivered.  Festival goers are promised to be given cutting edge to the minute updates but it is usually the main person running the festival who is in charge of updating, and he/she obviously gets too busy and does not have time to make any updates.  Or the responsibility gets handed down to a new intern who is way too excited to be there and also does no updating but is instead throwing up in some green room.

I hope that the film festival has taken this new role seriously and will be updating frequently, although im not sure since their Facebook page does not have a custom URL (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Santa-Barbara-International-Film-Festival/141996919640), the bio is from 2010, and they haven’t even created any events for their panels and award ceremonies.

For more information on the festival where I plan to spend a lot of time check out the links bellow

SBIFF Website
Twitter
Facebook

We all know the web was infiltrated by Facebook and Twitter last year.  Understanding WHY and HOW they were successful goes beyond examining their respective business models.  So let’s see WHO made the most impact on the web for Facebook and Twitter.

The infographic is from Digital Surgeons.

One thing that has been awesome about the development of the “Twittersphere” has been the ability to get up close and personal with athletes, artists, comedians, actors, and musicians. There are those who choose to have companies (Like @Oniracom) handle their twitter accounts, but the occasional Celebs will actually take the time to share snippets of their lives and experiences with the world via Twitter.

Billboard.com has taken advantage of this new medium of communication, and has begun threading together the best music tweets of the week. It is an entertaining feature and the list is shared by all sorts of musicians saying funny and interesting things, but best of all it?s a one-stop shop for all the best music tweets. The feature is called the Top 20 Tweets of the Week and is a home-page featured link on Billboard.com.

Read More

Motorola recently released their new Smartphone the Motorola DEVOUR on Verizon Wireless. The phone looks essentially like a shrunk-down and better-engineered version of their holiday marketing success the Motorola DROID. However the new Android powered Smartphone has not only received a firmware update, but also an innovative integrated social widget called MOTOBLUR (Motorola really takes to YELLING in their brand marketing, for the sake of your eyes I’ll refrain from emulating their extravagant use of text size).

Read more.

From SmashingMagazine.com to DesignBump to Magazine sites like Print and CMYK, there are tons of great design resources out there. But lately, there is one resource that has been providing me with more exciting content and educational articles than any other, Design-Newz.

Design-Newz, which was built and is run by the guys over at Spyre Studios, is an invaluable resource for any designer.  It hosts a virtual library of design blog posts.  Basically, they search the web for the latest and greatest design articles and then post links to those articles on their project website Design-Newz.com.

To help promote the blog posts, they employ twitter.  I follow them on twitter and get their regular tweets linking to hundreds of different design blogs with high quality articles that offer free brushes, photoshop tutorials, and inspirational collections of work by designers.  Thus far, they’ve been a wonderful and welcome source of inspiration as I’ve worked on our company’s websites.

Their work and their site exhibits four things that inspire me: A unique idea, Fantastic quality, Regular and consistent updates (they commit to at least having 5-10 updates a day), and a humble attitude that seeks to promote great work over purely personal gain.

Go follow them on twitter and start learning.

We recently launched the new Jack Johnson Music for his upcoming “En Concert” release.  The launch includes a brand new website layout, updated online store complete with digital downloads (integrated with physical merchandise shipments) and a social media campaign to promote the products.  Billboard.biz covered our Twitter widget:

Jack Johnson is harnessing the power of his Twitter followers to promote his new live album. Users send a form letter (form tweet?) to their followers and in return will get a free MP3. Nice. It’s simple, probably cost next to nothing, and will most likely be very effective. Oniracom, the company that runs Johnson’s website, offers a case study on its efforts to increase Matisyahu’s Twitter following and improve his Twittering. (For example, Matisyahu generated buzz by inviting five Twitter followers to his band rehearsal). (Mashable)

Read the Billboard Article

We recently launched the new www.jackjohnsonmusic.com for his upcoming “En Concert” release.  The launch includes a brand new website layout, updated online store complete with digital downloads (integrated with physical merchandise shipments) and a social media campaign to promote the products.  Mashable.com covered our Twitter widget:

It’s really simple: just head on to twitter.jackjohnsonmusic.com. There’s a premade Twitter message there (you can add 24 more characters if you like) that promotes the new album, titled En Concert, and all you need to do is login into your Twitter account and send it. The download of the promised tune (it’s a 192 kbps MP3) will start automatically.

Read the Mashable Article